Went back to the old neighborhood for the first time a while, went to a bar & grill that I remembered as something else, seems a real neighborhood gathering spot
There was a kids’ birthday party and both the towheaded brats and their parents reminded me of my cousins who toured with the Dead before becoming scrubbed Philly yuppie lawyer families
Then that cleared and there was an adult birthday party, and it was like a stock video of an NGO – a within-tolerances friendly, acceptably raucous group of 8, diverse in all identities except all being 30s educated urban professionals. The type that college students that were neither hipsters nor bros/woo girls became I guess.
And I overheard, and honestly, it seemed like they weren’t really close as performing closeness. Like, they weren’t quoting Will Ferrell movie lines at each other but the class-shifted 2020 equivalent – deploying reference points they all individually could have a stock relation to, without that much direct relation between people.
And I started prewriting this… what, brief for the prosecution? Like, c'mon, if I was there in the first place, either then or now, it was ultimately cause I’m from a professional background too, inherited so that means I didn’t even have to do the work, be that cranking billable hours or facetiming together a local elite.
And I knew I was a gentrifier at the time, just back then in that neighborhood that meant creative professional families that bought a Craftsman cheap in 2002 and elbow greased it, or young artsy/food service/scumbags splitting a house 5 ways. Market gets harder, apartments go up, people don’t make the step directly from “young artsy scumbag” to “creative professional family” as directly anymore.
But when I lived there was another bar on that stretch that was really too normie for my taste but what that meant at the time was like, multiple TVs on sports and OSU/UofO stuff on the walls, and pool tables and families in sweatshirts, that probably listened to mainstream radio stations and were the target market for the stuff advertised there and that didn’t tweak me the same way, y'know?
While I was writing this, in a diner, there was a table of three kids maybe 30 planning a board/card game night, first picking a restaurant and then some games, describing and explaining the appeal of each. Then one guy left and the two remaining counseled each other – first he her about impostor syndrome involving her early career, “like a medical residency” where she sees several clients and makes a presentation in a day – therapist? LMT? nutritionist? Then she him about I forget even what.
And I can’t beef with the guys for bucking up their friends and planning to hang out, but the freaky thing was how… businesslike it was. The first part was not only like a meeting but it was like “holding meetings around a conference table” was their natural idiom, all keeping the flow and making sure each other felt valued for their contributions.
And the second part was like, therapy. They were performing “empathy” as a trained skill, and for however squishy it sounded were remarkably efficient at reorienting and remoralizing each other without actually addressing the issues they brought up, the imperfections in the self they gave up on perfection to at least admit.
And all dynamics are different, and I’m maybe a little undersocialized, but I have never seen people act like that, outside of professional workplaces. Like I came up in a professional milieu, around therapeutic professionals even – Freudian psych was still a residual thing! And even they reserved that for professional clients and were real people off the clock.
And like, to encounter this in a gaming group. Hanging out at the comic shop playing Magic, seeing grognards talk about L5R on IRC, Gen Xers snarking about LARPing Vampire and crossing your arms to turn invisible, nothing would have prepared me.
Hell, even moving to Portland in 2011, being pleasantly surprised at the multiple gaming stores, going to a Molly Crabapple-brand life drawing event of Frank Frazetta-type fantasy poses in the back room decorated as a castle and licensed as a pub…
I dunno, gentrification and displacement in general, recent shifts in Portland in particular, “PMC” stuff in politics, as vs. right-populists or left dirtbags culturally, vs. everyone economically, “bullshit jobs”, fights for control of the media, the narrative, the culture of the internet… they all seem accelerated by this feeling there’s this professional-therapeutic middle class… blob of humanity out there, no longer confined to dead-end suburbia, with no depth, no positive qualities, no discernable human qualities at all, no clear talents besides validating each other in their qualityness blandness, and if they’re not checked they’ll consume everything of value and just shit it out as validated nothingness. I feel it too.
